A Conversation with Horizon Robotics' Kai Yu: Buffett and Munger Are My Absolute Idols; Entrepreneurship Is Fundamentally a Form of Investment | Linear Talk

After a decade-long journey from scientist to founder, Kai Yu, the founder and CEO of Horizon Robotics, has brought a Chinese tech company to the global table, turning it into a Hong Kong-listed company valued at over 100 billion RMB.

As the first investor Yu approached when starting out, Harry Wang, founder and CEO of Linear Capital, witnessed Horizon's entire journey from zero to over 100 billion. Recently, Harry and Dr. Yu sat down for a special "fireside chat" — no script, no pleasantries, just two old friends of over ten years having a real conversation about entrepreneurship and life.

At the starting point of 2026, we're sharing this conversation with you. Whatever stage of exploration you find yourself in, we believe this candid dialogue will offer you some refreshingly different perspectives.

This was an atypical "fireside chat" that began at ten in the morning.

With a bottle of whiskey opened, Harry and Dr. Yu, founder of Horizon Robotics, started from the emotional journey of entrepreneurship and spoke freely about the company's life-or-death moments over the past decade, the cultivation of inner resilience, and business reflections.

In this conversation, Yu rarely opened up about how he "forgets" those darkest moments, how he combats the drain on his mental energy with "mindless optimism," and how he found the rhythm of business between the identities of scientist and CEO. He also addressed questions on many people's minds: why he dared to go public during Hong Kong's market downturn and still won support from top-tier international funds, and how he views automakers developing their own chips.

Yu said that the people he admires are Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, and Duan Yongping, because whether in entrepreneurship or life's decisions, the essence is always investment — making decisions by thinking about long-term returns. So for Horizon, the goal isn't to "live flashy," but to be a "boring" company that keeps playing at the table for the long haul.

▌Harry Wang: Today we're honored to have Kai Yu, founder of Horizon Robotics, for this fireside chat — though that's a rather formal way to put it. Usually I just say: this is my buddy, we used to grab skewers together by the roadside.

As you all know, these fireside chats can easily fall into clichés, asking questions everyone already knows the answers to. So today I specifically picked out a bottle of whiskey. Sitting here at ten in the morning, drinking and chatting with Kai — hoping to share some genuine answers with you all.

Kai and I have known each other for over ten years, talking constantly since before he started his company, and I was the first institutional investor in Horizon. Let me start by asking: How do you evaluate Horizon's development over the past decade? Are you happy?

▌Kai Yu: I think it's about accepting all possibilities. Of course a lot happens when you build a company, but no matter what, we're still at the table, and that makes me very satisfied, very happy. Not the kind of happiness where you're grinning from ear to ear, but more a feeling of luck, or gratitude.

Because our company's underlying value has long been this: believing that living long matters more than living flashy. So for us, being able to keep playing at the table matters more than anything else. In other words, I probably enjoy the process more than the outcome.

▌Harry Wang: In your memory, have there been any life-or-death darkest moments?

▌Kai Yu: There have been countless hard moments, always thinking "how do I get through this." But once you ask me about them, I usually need a long time to even recall them.

What got me through those darkest moments, I think first of all comes down to mental resilience — you have to be able to tough it out. I shared a story the other day about an early investor friend who said, looking back at the entrepreneurs who later succeeded, they all had one trait. It was like a dish from Jiangsu and Zhejiang: you take a live fish, deep-fry it until it's stunned, put it on the table, but you see its eyes are still wide open, glaring. No matter if there are a thousand or ten thousand reasons to quit, in the end it's those entrepreneurs who keep glaring, who keep going, who make it to the end. I deeply relate to that.

I recall meeting Jensen Huang around 2011, and comparing his state then to his appearances recently — from tens of billions to four or five trillion dollars in market cap, his energy hasn't changed, those two eyes still glaring bright. Same with Elon Musk — both of them have this combat readiness that's always on.

So I think when you hit those darkest moments, first of all mental resilience, intellectual capacity, and physical stamina are the basic skills of an entrepreneur. Without the physical stamina, don't even come to play — that's the price of admission, not what wins you the hand. The skill that wins you the hand, I think, first comes from mental resilience, then intellectual capacity. But for most entrepreneurs today, physical and intellectual capacity are there — whether your mental resilience can carry you through, that's what matters infinitely.

▌Harry Wang: So how did you build up your mental resilience?

▌Kai Yu: I think it's mindless optimism, even pathological optimism — believing that no matter how big the difficulty, you can sleep tonight, no matter what, this day will pass, and tomorrow morning you fight again.

▌Harry Wang: I remember several times you called me, and within five seconds I knew you'd had quite a bit to drink. But I should say, I'm actually grateful that many founders call me late at night, saying things they wouldn't dare say during the day — in those moments I see their vitality. As you said, no matter what, tonight will pass, the sun will still rise tomorrow. As long as your mental resilience holds, many things don't necessarily go in the worst direction.

▌Kai Yu: I believe entrepreneurs are born to learn how to forget — that is, you only focus on the present and the future. So asking me to look back at what darkest moments there were, I can't remember them, they basically don't exist for me. Forgetting is also a fundamental quality and capacity for human survival.

▌Harry Wang: But even entrepreneurs with strong mental, physical, and intellectual capacity make mistakes. How do you view mistakes versus failure?

▌Kai Yu: I think we've made countless mistakes in our history. For example, the first five years were basically groping in the dark, unable to find the entry point for our business. Every strategy meeting was supposed to end in the afternoon, but basically never wrapped up before midnight. Because most scientists who become entrepreneurs start with no feel for business, no instinct for commerce.

But I maintain a basic attitude: accept your own mistakes. I never regret anything, because I've always believed everything is the best arrangement. In my view, every mistake is an opportunity, helping me find the narrow gate to the future faster.

I recently watched a video that resonated deeply — Roger Federer speaking at a commencement. He said that in his career, he won roughly over 80% of his matches. But if you look at it by points, what was his win rate? Actually only 54%. Meaning basically every point he had barely a 50% chance of winning, yet he never thought about how he lost the previous few points. For him, it was always about giving his all to the current point, completely forgetting what came before.

I'm the same way — I forget past gains and losses, and take every decision in the present seriously. We do retrospectives internally all the time, but the purpose of each retrospective is to play the current point better, so this is a mentality of absolutely no regret, a state of exhilarating unity between self and the moment, complete immersion.

▌Harry Wang: So you learn new things from past failures and lessons to help play the next matches better, and you really enjoy the process.

▌Kai Yu: Right, if you can't enjoy it, then retrospectives become a painful process.

▌Harry Wang: You mentioned Federer, and that suddenly makes me think — do you have any particular idols you look up to? Why?

▌Kai Yu: Actually you can draw different nourishment from different people. But if you look at my talks in many places, one thing has been remarkably consistent: Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are my absolute idols. Among Chinese entrepreneurs, Duan Yongping ranks number one in my mind.

Why? Though on the surface they're mainly in investing, whether in entrepreneurship or making many decisions in life, the essence is actually investment** — making decisions by thinking about long-term returns. So their thinking has given me tremendous nourishment.**

Take Horizon, for example. Our strategic thinking methodology distilled from ten years of entrepreneurship: the first principle is "compete where there is no competition," the second is "don't dance on the edge of a cliff." Essentially it's about not taking risks — which sounds strange, aren't VCs supposed to be encouraging us to take risks with their money? But we're almost pathologically "risk-averse."

Like at the end of 2019, we cut our headcount in half within a month. Everyone was guessing whether Horizon was about to collapse? In reality we still had over 3 billion RMB in cash on our books — we just weren't satisfied with ourselves, our strategy needed focus, otherwise there would be risks down the road.

Charlie Munger has a famous line: if I knew where I was going to die, I would never go there. Buffett says the essence of investing is not losing money. These might sound so boring, with none of that passionate, burning drive to fight and take risks. Let me be clear, there's no right or wrong in which path you choose — but from our underlying values, Horizon doesn't pursue extreme coolness; we want to be a "boring" company that can keep playing at the table.

▌Harry Wang: How do you view Horizon's development state after going public? Are you satisfied?

▌Kai Yu: On one hand, I think we're still alive, so I'm definitely satisfied. But on the other hand, we're going all out thinking about how to keep playing match after match. So what do I spend the most energy on? I care about "today" and "the day after tomorrow," not so much about "tomorrow." Because "tomorrow" is the result of "today," but "the day after tomorrow" is the big vision and direction for the future — that's important too, but I think "today" matters most, that's what you can directly think about and act on.

▌Harry Wang: This perspective is very interesting. We always say that in investing, we can predict short-term maybe one to two years, and long-term we can look five to ten years ahead, but what happens in those middle years often exceeds our capabilities. But I believe if you do today well, tomorrow's results naturally won't be bad.

I remember several amazing things around Horizon's IPO. One was that many companies going public around that time were basically relying on cornerstones or local government support, but very few had the kind of support from major, well-known international investment institutions that you did, including Baillie Gifford and others. So my question is: how did Horizon achieve this?

▌Kai Yu: If you look at AI entrepreneurship in China over the past decade, Horizon is one of the rare companies that has consistently adhered to market-driven, product-oriented principles. In the short term, this may have been somewhat disadvantageous in certain aspects, but in the long term you're more nourished by it.

Reflecting on the IPO, we had intense discussions when we started considering it at the end of 2023. Many people felt the Hong Kong market atmosphere was terrible — poor liquidity, low valuations. But we actually had some contrarian thinking.

We felt the Hong Kong market is still very fair, transparent, and rule-of-law based, and it's connected to international standards. And based on our judgment of long-term trends, we believe that with China's R&D talent advantages, the globalization trend of Chinese innovative enterprises is deterministic, and being in Hong Kong relatively better attracts global capital. So we pitched to long-term fund investors. In the end, in an environment where external sentiment toward China was still relatively pessimistic, we effectively proved to everyone that Chinese tech companies can still attract top-tier global capital.

Baillie Gifford wasn't just our biggest supporter at IPO — they're still buying now. Everyone's seen how prosperous Hong Kong stocks have been these past few months. So I think you still need to have judgment about the future.

▌Harry Wang: Things reverse when they reach extremes, what goes down must come up.

▌Harry Wang: We've also invested in some executives who left Horizon. There's one thing about them that really moved me — this attitude of "no matter what, scrambling and stumbling, getting the thing done." Is this a kind of ethos that Horizon people have?

▌Kai Yu: This is similar to what I said about "being that fish with glaring eyes" — it's a matter of mental resilience. But we never actually let ourselves get into such dangerous situations. We have a thinking methodology — the gate of life and the gate of death.

Most entrepreneurs probably feel they need to put 80% or even all their energy into finding where the opportunities are, but we might spend 80% of our energy thinking about where the gate of death lies** — financial risks, compliance risks, competitive risks. And if we know where the cliff is, we want to stay as far away from it as possible. For example, look at the intelligent driving chip赛道 we're in today — in China there actually aren't too many competitors.**

▌Harry Wang: Aren't you worried about non-third-party automakers developing their own chips? NIO, XPeng, and Li Auto have invested heavily in developing their own chips. Other manufacturers might not use them, but their own usage would also affect some of your business.

▌Kai Yu: Definitely worried, but we think more about the gate of death, pondering "where might we die in the future," and keeping 50 meters, 100 meters of distance from that scenario. Regarding automakers making their own chips, I think you have to accept all possibilities — you can't say "you can't do that," right? Because everyone has the ambition to be the next Musk.

So when I get together drinking with these automaker friends, I always say "you should do these businesses, what can I help you with?" Because I think we can only do our own part well — make the product good, make it more competitive.

I know there will definitely be vertically integrated companies like Apple and Tesla in this world, but there will also be more space for open ecosystems like Lenovo, Dell, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, Samsung — we just need to do our job well in that space.

▌Harry Wang: So you're still good friends with them now?

▌Kai Yu: Of course, just the other day I was drinking with Xiang Li.

▌Harry Wang: I've noticed that very successful entrepreneurs share a trait — they can treat many people without seeing things in black and white, as enemies or friends. Sometimes helping each other, sometimes in fierce competition, yet still remaining friends while competing.

▌Kai Yu: I think you need a kind of advanced thinking on this. At a low dimension, you're like an ant in a maze, feeling this path is blocked or the world is always against you; but when you look from a higher dimension, you find everything in the world connects.

From our perspective, I think we always consider doing our own fundamental moves well. Recently OPPO's CEO Tony Chen said something excellent — he said in playing Go, don't consider whether your opponent is a master, just purely from the board position, what do you think is your best fundamental move? This doesn't depend on who the opponent is, but on what the facts are. You first need to do the right thing, then do the thing right.

▌Harry Wang: Right, do the right thing and do it right. But I have a second half to that: drink well and have fun.

▌Kai Yu: When I was at Baidu I also told my team to do what you love. But in this world, not everyone has the luxury and luck to do what they love. Most people choose to do things they don't necessarily love at first out of necessity. But I think there's another attitude: transform yourself. When you can't change the world, change yourself. Love what you do, turn what you're doing now into something you love. I think both attitudes are extremely positive.

▌Harry Wang: As a representative of scientists turned entrepreneurs, what do you feel have been your growth and gains from these years of entrepreneurship?

▌Kai Yu: I often say internally, turn every day's Delta into the constant of your life — Delta being the change in mathematics. If I change every day, then everything is possible in the future. Like running a marathon — if you're always focusing on how far the finish line is, you can't keep going. What you can focus on is each step, and after some time, you'll find the light boat has already passed ten thousand mountains.

▌Harry Wang: Not comparing yourself with others, that's important. If you only look at what many people have achieved, you might fall into anxiety and depression every day.

▌Kai Yu: And actually everyone is equal — we come naked, we leave naked. The only difference is the process each person experiences every day.

▌Harry Wang: So what's been your biggest Delta over the past ten years?

▌Kai Yu: If I had to say what the real gain of entrepreneurship is, I think it's making myself richer. Whether looking at business trends, technology trends, or now having to pay attention to international affairs, global macro trends. Many challenges come rushing in, but as you're scrambling to catch and deflect them, this process actually makes your experience richer, more interesting.

▌Harry Wang: I once read a line: "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times." I also deeply believe that turbulent times produce heroes. If you view it pessimistically, many challenges will destroy you, but if you view these challenges optimistically, they're all opportunities.

One last question: what advice do you have for entrepreneurs today?

▌Kai Yu: Actually the startup ecosystem has become very good again recently, compared to the past few years. My own feeling is that the world always has cycles — there will definitely be good times and bad times. For entrepreneurs, what matters is being able to cross cycles.

Specifically in terms of methodology, first, believe mindlessly in the future; second, when times are good think about crisis, when in crisis have confidence in the future — as long as you get through it, the next wave will definitely come. This might be very boring advice, but if you can actually wield this method in practice, it's very useful. And no matter how you trial and error and struggle through the process, the company's values must be right — at minimum people should know this is a team with clean, upright values.

In those difficult moments, you can talk to friends, but entrepreneurs are probably lonely by nature, so you also need to find a way to nourish yourself — perhaps studying history, studying philosophy, or other things — that knowledge will give you unexpected nourishment.

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